The Last Few Kilometres

He had just finished lovemaking, rather indifferently, and now he was returning home on the train. Outside the window, in the murky film of the fading autumn day, Moscow’s former suburbs swam past—clusters of identical white high-rises with laundry hanging on the balconies—which weren’t suburbs anymore, but inside the city now. Closer to the railroad huddled earthbound two-story structures, blackened with soot; plots of land fenced off with solid walls stretched along the rails, their terrain cluttered with car bodies, stacks of logs, or rusted constructions of unknown purpose.

As was her custom, she had greeted him all dressed up, wearing a little brooch, her hair teased, as if they were going to the theatre. He put his lips to her cheek, and then to her neck, in order to demonstrate his passion. Of course, he should have kissed her on the lips, but, as usual, they were covered in a thick layer of lipstick.

“What’s our plan?” she asked.

Theoretically, drinking and eating were supposed to come first, but this could lead to excessive palpitations during the hour of love. On the other hand, drinking and eating were pointless afterward, when he just wanted to have a smoke and get home as quickly as possible. And yet entirely refusing the repast she’d spent so long preparing would mean offending her.

“Why don’t we have a bite first,” he said. He’d reached a compromise decision: he would eat a little, have a drink, and leave the rest for later—he could figure it out then.

She rushed joyfully back and forth between the kitchen and the dining table in her one room, setting out plates, placing forks and napkins, while he reclined on the sofa. It was pleasant to watch how she fussed, pleasant to be in a clean, cozy room: the sideboard, wardrobe, and gramophone were so highly polished you could use them as mirrors, and a large, fluffy rug lay on the floor. He had a real mistress and she received him the way mistresses generally do only in the movies.

“Oy, don’t look, please, the place is so awful,” she said, setting a dish of steaming chicken and rice on the table; it was more or less the same thing she said when he undressed her.

She settled opposite him on a low chair; on the table between them were the hors d’oeuvres. He poured wine into the crystal goblets—he had always called them “wineglasses,” but she referred to them as “goblets,” and now he, too, thought of them that way. The wine was transparent, golden, light—exactly as it was supposed to be in such situations. She sat with her back to the window, facing him.

“It’d be nice to spend a day or two here,” he told her.

“Would you like some meat blini?” she suddenly remembered. “Only they’re just terrible. Is the chicken dry? It is, isn’t it?”

She ran into the kitchen and brought out the blini; as she started to serve him, he cleared some space on his plate, and dropped a drumstick on the floor. Embarrassed, he picked it up, and wanted to put it on the table, but she waved her hands in horror and took the drumstick back into the kitchen.

The blini were tasty—best of all, you didn’t have to chew them much. He’d left his removable denture at home so that it wouldn’t interfere with the moment of pleasure.

The high-rise buildings were fewer and farther between now. Outside the train window were the neighborhoods that had been built up in the fifties, with extruding cornices, bas-reliefs, and sculptural ensembles designed to depict bounty and the joy of labor. On the roof of one such building, a green neon sign read, “Dawn—A Specialized Shop for the Blind.” An oncoming train zipped past like a blast of wind; through the flickering of its cars and windows, the sign could still be seen distinctly.

“You’ve hurt my feelings,” she said when they lay side by side. He was staring up at the ceiling—he wanted to have a smoke and go home.

“Now, now, what’s all this? Everything was so delicious, and you are too . . .”

He didn’t finish his sentence so as not to say anything trite.

“A day or two, you said. It would have been better if you hadn’t said anything at all.”

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He turned toward her, and thought that her eyes were moist, but perhaps it was just her wide, dark pupils—afterward, her pupils were always enlarged, and sometimes he even stared into her eyes just to check.

The train stopped, although they weren’t at a station. There were several rows of rails, with freight cars and an entire train of restaurant cars, a brick water tower with broken windows, and farther on some buildings—tall and short ones, stone and wood, old and new, a mixture of eras and styles piled up randomly, like cliffs. The lights were already on in some of them. There were factory smokestacks, with immobile puffs of bluish-gray smoke above them, and beyond, through the smoke, he could just make out the contours of Moscow’s skyscrapers, with red warning lights on the tips of their spires, and these lights seemed to float in the sky. Probably the traffic signal was red, and Moscow wasn’t taking trains. A strange silence reigned in the car. There were a fair number of passengers, although no one was standing, but they were all quiet, and the only thing that could be heard was music—it might have been the shake or the twist. He began to look around to determine the source of the music. Diagonally across from him, next to the window, was a young man in a nylon jacket. Although he was sitting quietly like everyone else, it was obvious that the music was coming from his lap—he must have had a portable tape recorder. The voices singing the twist or the shake were going wild, though the tape recorder was set considerately at minimum volume, so the music wasn’t bothersome—you could listen to it or not. The train started to move, and the sound of the music was immediately drowned out by the clacking of the wheels. The stacked cliffs of buildings began to turn slowly with the train, unexpectedly revealing narrow cracks between them, through which trams and trucks could be glimpsed speeding along.

She pulled on her black slip, her whole body writhing like a snake, as though she were performing some Indian dance—she always put it on that way. He had finally lit a cigarette, and, watching her, was trying to figure out whether he’d make the train.

When he walked into the kitchen just before he left, he saw a chicken leg lying on a plate in the white enamelled sink, the very drumstick that he had dropped on the floor—she was probably planning to wash it and reheat it—and it seemed to him that he had foreseen all of this from the very beginning.

The train stopped once more—the rail line was probably still busy—and then he heard the music again, the same shake or twist or something of the sort, the same voices, alien, incomprehensible, ranting and raging, but unobtrusive. The singers would be shaking their shoulders, as if teasing someone, their bodies bent and gyrating, their wrists flapping, striking the strings of electric guitars in a frenzied tempo, as though whipping up shaving cream, but at the same time they’d remain in place, as if each of them were delineated by an invisible circle, so that all this ecstasy seemed fake, deliberately put on. Everyone in the train car continued to sit silently: a woman in a headscarf with a tired face; a girl holding a tattered book in her red, probably frostbitten hands; middle-aged men and women in sombre-colored, heavy coats.

He could no longer hear the music. The train was now crossing a bridge above a dark river with cement embankments; an ancient monastery on a hill above the river had once been on the outskirts but was now in the center of town. When the train stopped again, in the middle of the bridge, an unnatural, oppressive silence dominated the car. The young man had probably turned his tape recorder off; no one talked. In the early twilight, the dark, immobile figures around him were like symbols of people, and for a moment he thought that, if by some supernatural act he were removed from the car right that very second, nothing would change: the people would sit just as silently, continuing to resemble symbols of themselves; far below them would be the same river with cars streaming along its embankment road; and to the left would be the monastery with its white fortified walls and its empty, dingy courtyard. Ahead, the station’s traffic signals could already be seen—their green, yellow, and red lights, partly covered by visors, were dim, but when he turned a certain way they sparkled like rippling columns seen through a veil of rain or tears. ♦